


Good Business Sense

by Telperien



Series: BatCat Week 2018 [3]
Category: Batman (Comics), Catwoman (Comics)
Genre: BatCat Week 2018, F/M, Identity Porn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-10
Updated: 2018-11-10
Packaged: 2019-08-21 19:27:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16582601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Telperien/pseuds/Telperien
Summary: Bruce Wayne needs something stolen from Lex Luthor, and there's only one person he can turn to. Selina Kyle doesn't really have any choice in the matter now that Batman has given Bruce Wayne her name.BatCat Week 2018, Day Six:Team-Up.





	Good Business Sense

The Manchester Arms was far from the most exclusive hotel in Gotham, but it had its own certain kind of fame. The Manchester Arms was notable among all the Gotham hotspots not because its patrons were rich and famous but because they were _old money._

Selina liked old money. They had better taste in artwork and jewelry, and they smiled to your face while denigrating you behind your back. She didn’t care what people said about her when she wasn’t there, but when they said it to her face… Well, she could only take so much before she snapped. She hadn’t yet, but one of these days, she would.

She wondered if today would be the day.

The Manchester Arms wasn’t her usual scene, not in the least, but she hadn’t had a choice in the matter. Last week, Selina had gotten a phone call. _Selina Kyle_ had gotten a phone call, and the person on the other end (their voice machine-modified, not that she had the technology to identify them by voice anyway) had known she was Catwoman. Thus blackmailed, Selina couldn’t think of a single thing to do except obey their commands, and their only command so far was to meet someone—not necessarily her blackmailer, but she didn’t know who else it could be—for lunch at the Manchester Arms on Thursday where she was to hear out their job offer.

Not to _accept_ their job offer. Just to hear them out. Selina couldn’t decide whether they were being coy or if they genuinely meant she had a choice here. She suspected the former, but blackmailers weren’t usually so circumspect once they had power over their targets. They might very well mean the latter, only to use her refusal against her later.

She’d have to wait and see.

The reservation was under her name. That gave Selina nothing to work with except the way the host brightened when she introduced herself. “Your companion has already been seated, Ms. Kyle,” he said in a more deferential tone than before.

He took Selina to the back of the hotel restaurant. Their table was quiet and secluded, as far from the other diners as it possibly could be, and there was only one person sitting there, a tall and _familiar_ man.

Her dining companion stood up with a smile when Selina was within arm’s length of the table, and she smiled back because no one had ever told her what she should do when _Bruce Wayne_ was blackmailing her.

It couldn’t be him, she decided. There was someone else involved. There _had_ to be. By now, Selina had met Bruce Wayne as a dozen different women (not that he could know that), and each and every one of those women had left with the impression that Brucie was an idiot. A lovable idiot, sure, with a good heart and nice hair, but an idiot all the same.

Someone else had to be pulling the strings.

Wayne pulled out Selina’s chair for her. He ordered a bottle of wine so expensive Selina had to turn away in shock, told her that it was a treat to treat a woman as lovely as she, and complimented her outfit sincerely even though she was wearing her most businesslike pantsuit. His eyes didn’t linger too long on her breasts either, which was a mark in his favor every single time they’d encountered each other, no matter which guise she had donned. He was acting like the perfect gentleman.

 _God,_ he was jaw-achingly boring. If he weren’t rich and famous and handsome and blackmailing her, Selina definitely would have left long before the bread basket arrived.

Selina buttered a roll in an attempt to appear unconcerned when she asked, “Why did you ask me here, Mr. Wayne?”

He grinned, bright-eyed. “How did you guess it was me on the phone?”

How could anyone be this stupid? “Well… you’re here, aren’t you?” she said. She supposed he could have had an underling make the phone call for him, but if he had, he’d be even stupider than he seemed. The fewer loose ends the better, in this line of work.

His mouth dropped open. “Oh, that’s good.”

Selina said a silent prayer upstairs for Wayne Enterprises’ employees. With this guy at the helm, they’d need it. “Mr. Wayne, I would really like to know why you asked me to come here today. As lovely as this all is, I didn’t come here to have lunch with you.”

“You didn’t?”

She stared him down until his grin faltered.

“It’s like I said on the phone, Ms. Kyle. I have a job for you. A _sensitive_ job.” He cleared his throat and looked around to make sure the waiter and their fellow guests were far away. He almost looked like a different person right then, so serious and concerned, but he fixed that by the time he looked back at Selina. “Lex Luthor has something he shouldn’t. It’s called kryptonite, and it’s a radioactive mineral that could be very dangerous in his hands… not only can he weaponize it against humans, but it’s one of the few things in the universe that can harm Superman. I don’t know what your opinion of the Man of Steel is, Ms. Kyle, but whether you like him or not… Well, I for one don’t want Lex Luthor to have any power over the most powerful man alive.”

“You want me to steal this kryptonite.”

“I do.”

Selina should have expected something as difficult as that. Rich idiots didn’t resort to hiring infamous jewel thieves unless they had to. “Luthor has one of the best security systems in the world. I might get in, but I don’t know if I can get out. Especially if this kryptonite is as heavily guarded as you make it seem.”

“I have a plan,” Wayne said with all the confidence of a man who’d been born to wealth and power and who’d never had anything go wrong in his life.

Selina waited until their waiter had set down their entrees and left before saying, “Lay it out for me, Mr. Wayne. Your _plan._ ”

He smiled, his eyebrow raised, and Selina’s heart unexpectedly thumped.

“Lex Luthor is having a party inside the Lexcorp Building next week. Supposedly it’s to benefit the Metropolis Public Library, but really it’s another excuse to gather the rich and powerful of the city under his roof and show off his toys. I was invited, and I would naturally bring a date… yourself, Ms. Kyle, if you agree. We walk in through the door, we loop the security from within the system, you excuse yourself and break into his vault. We walk out before they even realize something’s missing. The next day, there’s an extra two million dollars in that Caymans account you have under the name Julie Meriwether.”

It was one hell of a job offer. And one hell of a threat.

She stalled for time. “Two million is a lot of money,” she said.

“It’s adequate recompense for a job well-done, I think.”

That may be, but Selina couldn’t agree to a job this dangerous—however confident Wayne was—without knowing something first.

Selina leaned in close, and Wayne perked up. He was just as easily led by his cock as she’d heard, the poor thing. “Before I agree to this, Mr. Wayne, you’ll have to answer one question—and answer it _honestly_.”

His pretty blue eyes lit up. “Of course, Ms. Kyle.”

“Who told you about me?”

“No one,” he said. He was smiling again. He knew it was a ridiculous story. “I figured it out all on my own.”

Selina shook her head. “Try again.”

Wayne’s smile disappeared, and his shoulders fell. “Well, alright, I guess… He can’t be too angry that I told you, can he? I mean, he was the one who told me to come to you in the first place.”

It was almost like the idiot _wanted_ to be cajoled into confiding everything to her. “Of course not, not if he told you to hire me,” Selina assured him, placing her hand on his and squeezing. “You’ve got to understand the way we _underworld_ people think, Mr. Wayne. To send you to me… He knows there’s no way I could trust you without knowing his name. He expected you to tell me who he is.”

Wayne believed her.

 _Dumbass_ , Selina thought almost fondly. That was how he won them all over. The entire city of Gotham was eating out of the palm of this rich guy’s hand, and it was that puppyish mixture of stupidity and genuine goodness that had made _Gotham Tonight_ swoon and the _Gazette_ sigh. Even the _East Ender_ had something nice to say about the area’s new benefactor, and the _East Ender_ hadn’t spoken well of anyone since Eugene V. Debs.

“Well, it was… You won’t believe me, but it was _Batman._ ”

Selina’s heart jolted. “Batman!” she repeated in the same hushed tone. She glanced around the dining room, but none of the other diners in the Manchester Arms heard a word.

Wayne nodded.

“I didn’t know you and he knew each other,” she said.

Wayne tilted his head to the side and scrunched up his nose. “I wouldn’t say we _know_ each other, but we’ve done business together before. We have similar agendas. He has his own reasons for wanting this out of Lex Luthor’s hands, you know.”

Selina would love to know, actually. She would love to know a lot of things about Batman that she didn’t, and she would listen gladly to everything beautiful, stupid Bruce Wayne told her. Everything Batman definitely couldn’t want her to know, but she could get that out of Wayne easily enough. “And what are those?” she asked.

“What are what?” Bruce asked. He blinked. “Oh, his _reasons?_ He didn’t tell me. I don’t think he’s told anyone.”

_Damn._

“Are you sure?” she asked. She leaned forward again and spoke in a low, intimate voice. “You can trust me, Mr. Wayne. I know it might not seem like it, considering… well, _everything_ … but we’re in this together now. We can’t afford secrets on this job.”

His shoulders relaxed. Selina hadn’t even noticed how tense he was. “So you’ll do it?” he asked.

She nodded. For two million dollars, Selina would do a lot of things. Especially if they put her in Batman’s debt and gave her leverage she could use against Bruce Wayne.

“Well then, I suppose…” he said, uncomfortably, “I mean, I think that Batman maybe wants this kryptonite out of Lex Luthor’s hands because it could be used to hurt Superman. And Superman is his friend.”

Selina tried to imagine her dark knight and the brightly colored, always smiling Superman as _friends._ She couldn’t see it. Maybe there was more to Superman than met the eye, but he _seemed_ like an open book.

“Do you really think so?” she asked.

Bruce stared at her, surprisingly intently. “They have to be. Don’t they?”

Selina had too little experience with friendship to say. She shrugged

 

Selina expected Wayne to try something on the plane, but he didn’t. He was uncharacteristically respectful of her, treating her more like a business partner than an attractive woman, and she didn’t know whether that was because they _were_ business partners or if he had enough sense to fear Catwoman’s wrath.

His respect had even bled into the plan. The dress he had acquired for her wasn’t the fetish fuel it could have been. It was a subtle but expensive purple number, more to Selina Kyle’s taste than Maria Kiesler’s.

Selina remembered that Maria Kiesler supposedly picked out the dress herself, and she amended her opinion of that identity. Maria Kiesler wasn’t in it for the tabloids, she was playing the long game.

Selina stood a little taller and allowed a spark of intelligence into her eyes. _There._ She was the perfect fortune hunter now.

Bruce Wayne was the perfect billionaire too, she noted approvingly when she stepped outside of her hotel room and met her escort for the evening. Selina had watched too many adaptations of _Pride and Prejudice_ on quiet nights in with Holly, who liked anything with a happy ending _,_ so she knew a Mr. Darcy when she saw one.

It was a shame Wayne didn’t share Mr. Darcy’s intelligence, but that hardly mattered. Selina wasn’t _really_ dating him.

“You look lovely,” he said.

She raised an eyebrow. “You bought the dress.”

Wayne gave her an unusually sharp look, one that might have passed unnoticed by anyone else, but Selina prided herself on her good character judgment. He was amused too, and he looked at her like he expected her to join in on his amusement. Like they were friends of some kind instead of temporarily business partners. “I said that _you_ look lovely, Ms. Kiesler, not the dress.”

Selina smiled. “You don’t look bad yourself, Mr. Wayne. Shall we?”

“Of course.”

The Lexcorp Building was an eyesore even among the modern cityscape of Metropolis. It was all glass and steel, more a monument to Luthor's ego and money than to any architectural style, and Selina imagined that everyone working there lost their soul a bit day by day as they were forced to endure the hideous art. It had to be a slow, painful death.

Luthor didn’t need to worry about the death of his soul, though. He had lost it long ago, probably in a deal with the Devil. “Bruce Wayne, all the way from Gotham!” he said, half smiling and half sneering. “Look what the cat dragged in! And who is this?”

He grabbed hold of Selina’s hand before someone with Maria Kiesler’s reflexes could be expected to react, so Selina had to suffer his overelaborate kiss on the back of her hand and sweaty grip with a gracious smile as she thought, _Fucking cat jokes_.

Well, so much for her disguise.

“Marla Kiesler,” Wayne said.

“Maria,” Selina corrected. Wayne was the one who had come up with this cover identity (or maybe Batman had, she didn’t actually know), and he had _forgotten it?_

Wayne grimaced. “Right, _Maria_. Marla was—” He coughed, then he was back to being Brucie again. “Wonderful party, Lex! Is that Ted Kord over by the buffet? I haven’t seen him since Ollie Queen’s birthday bash two years ago.”

“I’m sure you missed him very much,” Luthor said sarcastically.

Wayne dragged Selina over to the nerd standing alone with a plate of hors-d’oeuvres and a stain on his jacket. She allowed it, this one time. She was too shocked to fight him over it, and she wouldn't have dared to do it in public anyway.

“That was a nice trick there,” she said curtly.

“What do you mean?”

_I mean that you pretended to forget my name to get out of that conversation with Luthor, and now you’re pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about. I **mean** now Luthor believes you don’t know I’m Catwoman, even though he definitely knows, because you’re too stupid to keep it to yourself if you did, and once he figures out I’m the one who stole his kryptonite, he’ll think you’re nothing but the stoolie I used to get in here and hunt me down instead of you._

“Nothing,” she said.

 

Selina expected that she would be on her own when it was time to actually steal the kryptonite. Obviously, Wayne wanted to keep his hands clean so he could throw her under the bus later, if it came to that.

She was surprised.

When Luthor went up to give his speech, Wayne leaned in and said, “Why don’t we find somewhere more… secluded?”

A couple nearby looked horrified, so Selina giggled loudly and slipped her hand into Wayne’s. Luthor didn’t notice them go. He was too preoccupied with rambling while the library president grew increasingly uncomfortable, and his security staff weren’t told about the thief in their midst. _Luthor_ knew she was Catwoman, but he hadn’t told anyone else.

Stupid of him, really.

Selina and Wayne took the service corridor down to the basement. The vault supposedly opened at the other end of the building, but it had only taken Selina ten minutes with the schematics Wayne had given her to realize there was a second, secret way in. Luthor must have thought he was so clever when he put that in there, a backdoor so only he could reach his precious store of kryptonite, but Selina was used to outthinking clever men.

Wayne had called her “brilliant” when she told him about that. She wondered if Batman had already found that way in and just hadn’t told Wayne, or if even he hadn’t found it.

“Are you going to stand guard?” Selina asked once they had reached the vault door, which was hidden behind a permanently locked door that was supposedly a closet.

Wayne grinned. “Shouldn’t I come in with you to protect our cover story? My—uh—my _friend_ looped the cameras, but I can’t guarantee that no one will come looking for us.”

“Right,” she said. She reached under her dress’s skirt for her lock-picking tools.

Luthor might be one of the most intelligent men in the world, like his press people claimed, but he had his flaws when it came to security. First and foremost was his belief that no one could get into his buildings in the first place (no one who wasn’t Superman, anyway), so why should he bother with a security system that would actually challenge a thief once they were inside?

Second was his belief that no one would ever _dare_ steal from _Lex Luthor._

Selina rappelled down the chasm every supervillain just had to have in his lair. Wayne watched her go with a worried twist to his mouth. She was almost flattered that he bothered, but she was also a little offended—this was the easy part. He could start worrying when they had to escape Lexcorp with a piece of stolen kryptonite hidden in Selina’s panties.

She landed with only a whisper of sound and turned around to get a better look at the vault.

Laserbeams were such a cliché way of keeping people out, but that was the Luthor brand after the past few years of “malfunctioning” robots that all seemed to attack Planet Earth’s Kryptonian houseguest for some reason. At least now Selina knew why Batman wasn’t doing this job himself. He’d never fit through the gaps between lasers, not like Selina could—provided she took off her dress first, which she did.

Once Selina reached the vault door, it was just a matter of attaching the device Wayne had given her to the keypad and waiting for his “friend” to crack the code.

Batman worked quick. The door clicked open, and the kryptonite was just _sitting there_ on a pedestal. There were no further protections in place, just some artistic lighting to make it look appropriately dramatic.

“It’s like you _want_ it to get stolen,” she muttered under her breath, and she pulled an Indiana Jones to trick the weight sensors. After that, a normal rock sat on the pedestal, and Selina tossed the chunk of kryptonite up in the air, then caught it and placed it inside the lead-lined box Wayne had also provided.

All she had to do next was get out of this tower without Luthor noticing.

No pressure.

Wayne was waiting for her at the top of the chasm. He’d removed his bowtie and ruffled his hair, even bitten his own lips, to make it look like they had been going at it this entire time.

Selina handed him the box, which he received with a pleased “Thank you, Ms. Kiesler,” and started mussing herself up. Her dress was already wrinkled from leaving it on the floor while she committed her burglary, but she took down her hair and smudged her makeup to really sell it.

“How do I look?” she asked when she was done.

Wayne laughed. “You don’t want me to answer that. Let’s get back there. We have at least another hour of gladhanding before we can escape, and Luthor already suspects something… Stick close to me, Ms. Kyle. His security won’t dare touch my date, no matter what he suspects. He hasn’t grown that audacious yet.”

She didn’t like the idea of spending another hour on Wayne’s arm as he made nice with the other billionaires, but she was going to be two million dollars richer at the end of the night. If the choice was between two million dollars and years in jail, Selina knew which option she’d take and without complaining. “Alright,” she agreed.

Wayne didn’t place her hand on his arm this time. He held it in his own like they were here _together_ -together, and people noticed when they walked back into the party. That was part of the act too. Obviously. There was no other reason why Bruce Wayne would be holding her hand. It was a good business decision, pure and simple.

Wayne winked at an exasperated-looking reporter, and Selina laughed. When her escort glanced over at her, wondering why she was laughing, she said, “It’s been a pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Wayne.”

“Perhaps it won’t be the last time,” he hinted hopefully.

Selina laughed again. “Maybe not, but probably. Even you can’t afford to pay me this well every time you want a new bauble.”


End file.
